links for 2009-04-06

since April is Earth Month, I thought I’d share some of the ways I’m trying to make my business more environmentally conscious. Maybe you can implement a few of these in your own day-to-day activities this month and going forward.

Working from home, I have complete control over my work environment. Among the benefits of working from home, there are a lot of things I can do to make my home and work environment more earth-friendly. One of the easiest ways is simply turning off the lights and shutting down your equipment (and the surge protector) when you’re not working. This is an easy habit to adopt and then carry throughout all rooms in your home.

This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

The current rate of extinction is 100 to 1000 times higher than the average, or background rate, making our current period the 6th major mass extinction in the planet’s history.
Although fossil reconstructions or pictorial representations can sometimes be difficult to connect with, it’s impossible to ignore the experience of seeing a photograph of an animal on the brink of extinction.
Thus, what follows is a list of 11 extinct animals that were photographed while still alive.

ost bloggers make lists of their most popular posts of the year, but instead of doing that (you can browse the archives here if you’d like) I thought I’d do something different and piece together a few smart/inspirational quotes from several bloggers I’ve been reading this year.

And then I heard that some CIOs are holding “social media” briefings in agencies. Hey, there’s a whole sub-group of the Federal Web Managers Council who thought they were the champions for social media! What’s the deal here?

Well, there’s good news: there’s plenty of room in this sandbox for everyone – web managers and new media specialists and CIOs. In fact, we need them all. But – and this is so critical – each of them needs to understand and respect what the others bring to the sandbox so they can work together, and not at odds. After all, we all want to build the same thing – an open, transparent government that delivers the services that its citizens want and need. We just need a governance structure to keep us organized.